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10 Years of Mesmerizing Photos From NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope

For 10 years, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has been helping scientists on Earth learn more about the mysterious objects hiding in our star-studded skies. On August 25, 2003, the telescope -- carrying a relatively small, 0.85-meter beryllium mirror -- launched from Cape Canaveral, FL. Since then, it's been trailing the Earth on its orbit around the sun, like NASA's Kepler spacecraft.

Spitzer stares at the heavens in infrared wavelengths, revealing the cold, distant, and dusty realms of the universe, normally invisible to eyes on Earth. In this gallery, ribbons of dust wind around massive stars, the cavities carved by hot, young stars open up like bottomless caverns, and the spiraling tendrils of a distant galaxy glisten behind a foreground nebula.

Spitzer's first years in operation were spent studying the sky in the longest infrared wavelengths, a task that required cooling the instruments to within a few degrees of absolute zero. When the liquid helium coolant ran out -- long after the mission's minimal 2.5-year duration -- the telescope switched to a "warm" phase, where it studies objects nearer the Earth at shorter wavelength.

During its time in space, Spitzer has seen, for the first time, an exoplanet's glimmering light, discovered the largest ring around Saturn, and stared at the center of the Milky Way.

Instead of celebrating with a traditional 10-year anniversary gift of tin or aluminum (because let's face it, that's lame), we thought we'd share some of the extraordinary images produced by this telescope. We thought we'd pick one for each year, but it was impossibly hard to choose from among the many transfixing spacescapes crossing our screens. So, after much agonizing, we finally picked these 16 beauties.

Above:

Helix Nebula

What looks like an even more terrifying version of the Eye of Sauron is actually the Helix Nebula, about 700 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. Here, the white dwarf star (visible in the very center), is the dead remnant of what was once a star like the sun. The bright red glow immediately around it is probably the dust kicked up by colliding comets that survived the death of their stellar host.

Fiery Space Flower

What looks like a flaming peony is actually the Large Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way's satellite dwarf galaxies, located about 163,000 light-years from Earth. The fiery ribbons in the image are giant ripples of dust spanning many light-years, and wrap around several centers of active star formation. This image is a composite of observations from the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory and Spitzer.

Sombrero Galaxy

What appears to be one gorgeous galaxy is actually two: A thin disk galaxy (in red), embedded within a large elliptical galaxy (in blue), about 28 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. Infrared images from Spitzer revealed the Sombrero galaxy's hidden double nature; previously, astronomers thought it was just a flat and lonely disk galaxy.

Tycho's Supernova Remnant

What looks like a cell floating in a starry petri dish is the remnant of a supernova that exploded in 1572, and was witnessed by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (who not only had a gold-and-silver replacement nose, but a pet elk who liked to drink beer). This image is a composite of data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Spitzer.

The Wing of the Small Magellanic Cloud

We love this image because it looks as though a cosmic pair of T. rex jaws are about to gobble up some unsuspecting young stars. In reality, this is a region known as the "Wing" of the Small Magellanic Cloud, one of the Milky Way's satellite dwarf galaxies. Here, Chandra X-Ray Observatory data are in purple, optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope are shown in red, green and blue, and infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope are shown in red.

Milky Way

The plane of the Milky Way glows in multiple colors as Spitzer stares straight into the heart of our galaxy. The bright, central star cluster looks like a ball of flaming beads and dominates the image, which spans 2,400 light-years.

Sculptor Galaxy

The Sculptor Galaxy, 11.4 million light-years away, is seen in these three Spitzer images. The largest is a composite of the two smaller images, each observed during Spitzer's early "cold" mission. Visible in the southern sky, the galaxy is known as a starburst galaxy because its nucleus contains a region of profuse star formation.

Zeta Ophiuchi

A giant star zooming through space at 54,000 miles per hour creates a bowshock, ripples that are the result of billowing stellar winds colliding with the dust ahead of it. About 370 light-years away, Zeta Ophiuchi is 80,000 times brighter than the sun; it would be one of the brightest stars in the sky, but it's invisible from Earth, obscured by dust and clouds.

Globular Cluster

Glittering like a cosmic gemstone, this globular cluster, called Omega Centauri, hovers in the southern sky nearly 17,000 light-years from Earth. Globular clusters are among the oldest objects in the universe and contain millions of stars.

Coiled Galaxy

This is a galaxy coiled like a two-tailed snake surrounding a giant eye (which is really a supermassive black hole ringed by a bunch of risk-taking stars). It's also known as NGC 1097, and lives 50 million light-years away in the constellation Fornax. On the left, the glowing blue dot is a companion that appears to be wedged between the snake's tails like an extragalactic egg.

Bright Superbubble

Massive stars grow quickly and die young, exploding in radiant supernovae. A large cluster of these hot, young stars will generate stellar winds and shock waves that carve superbubbles into the fabric of their nurseries, like the ones seen here, about 160,000 light-years away in NGC 1929.

Galactic Merger

The cores of two merging galaxies form what appear to be giant blue eyes, peering out from behind a swirling red mask. Galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163, located about 140 million light-years from Earth, began merging relatively recently -- about 40 million years ago. Eventually, the pair will form a giant cycloptic eye.

Eta Carinae

Eta Carinae is a relatively nearby star, 10,000 light-years away, that is 100 times more massive than the sun. The star is blindingly bright, and blows violent amounts of energy into the dust around it. The Eta Carinae nebula normally looks like a dumbbell -- except in the infrared, where the effects of the whipping stellar winds are evident in the ragged and beaten-up clouds around the star.